SuicideGirls.com's Top 10 Films of the Decade

Suicide Girls.com is arguably the greatest, hottest alternative lifestyle site on the internet featuring thousands of pictures of unique beautiful women. Those hot, smart and awesome tattoo'd girls have gotten together and ranked their ten favorite films of the last ten years. Everybody listen.

Before Sunset is a blur of constant motion, with its central, early-thirties couple frequently walking towards and away from the camera at a brisk pace, catching rides in fast-moving cars and boats, and finally trudging up the stairs to a top-floor apartment. The point, unsubtle but valid, is that life’s forward momentum is as unstoppable as an ocean wave, and only the fools among us would let a chance for real happiness pass us by as we’re pushed inexorably along. This immeasurably superior sequel to Richard Linklater’s 1995 one-night-in-Paris romance, Before Sunrise, which clocks in at barely 80 minutes long, is so unusually knowing about the staying power of true love, the way dreams can affect our lives, and the reality of time never being on our side, that if you see it once, it may haunt you forever.

The badge around her neck reads: "I suffer from epilepsy. Please do not call an ambulance. Just move me to a warm, safe place." She strums guitar on stage at night and engages in pointless love affairs during the day. Maybe she was happier a hundred years ago. Three Times, from Taiwanese master Hsiao-hsien Hou, shows us a love affair played out in three time periods, always with the same actors. In 1911, the young couple is confident and self-aware, but restrained by social mores. In 1966, an ancient order is crumbling and excitement abounds. An open doorway in a pool hall points to an unknown f*ture. In 2005, freedom has dissipated again, into a morass of text messages and social confusion, while an ascendant, modern world is glimpsed as their motorcycle flies across elevated freeways. Who’s to say one era is more or less free than another?

It’s been remarked that the Dardenne brothers’ masterpiece L’Enfant is told from a God’s eye perspective. If so, that’s a terrifying thought. A dying steel town in the heart of Belgium is the setting for this unusually absorbing crime drama, which follows, in a noticeably detached and nonjudgmental fashion, petty con man Bruno and his girlfriend Sonia as they deal with a new, valuable item that has fallen into their laps: their baby. Bruno’s decision to sell his newborn child to a black market adoption ring is only one several surprising decisions he makes throughout the film; we’re consistently taken aback by his actions because his moral center is a black hole, perhaps as random as the universe itself. L’Enfant gazes deeply into our modern, money-mad world and asks, without a hint of glibness, whether traditional morality has any place in it at all.

Philosophy of Time Travel is the name of the secret textbook at the center of Donnie Darko, and that book title encapsulates the main character’s naïve, but endearing belief: that it’s somehow possible to discover a theorem or formula for skipping directly over the pain of one’s high-school years. This amazingly complex science-fiction film, a rollercoaster of invention from first-time director Richard Kelly, follows the travails of angsty teen Donnie Darko, a reluctant prophet who beliefs himself privy to knowledge of the f*ture – specifically an impending doomsday – and thus feels entitled to spend his remaining days fixing the world for the better. Donnie Darko has more to say about the horror film-scariness of being on the cusp of adulthood, and about the power of youth to shatter forever the outdated notions of their parents, than all of those 80s teen movies put together.

For many of us, the key factor of our lives is not whether we’ll ever grow up, but whether we’ll do so in time. Marie Antoinette boldly appropriates the biography of a doomed French queen to tell the story of an essentially modern young girl who is being dangerously sheltered against the harsh realities of the outside world and yet slowly develops her own innate, rebellious instincts, which she needs more urgently than she realizes. Sofia Coppola’s ditzy, celebrity-and-shoe obsessed teen queen, who moves through 18th century Versailles to the beat of a pop-punk soundtrack (she might as well be wearing earbuds), only slowly comes to understand that those courtesans plying her with the latest fashions and gossip are actually trying to tamp down her true power – her political power. It’s a weighty metaphor for the state of our own deliberately distracted youth culture.

We begin in the shabby apartment of Mr. Lazarescu, a Romanian senior played by Ion Fiscuteanu, who spends his time complaining on the phone to distant relatives. Most of them seem to have defected to Canada, maybe to get away from him. We end nearly three hours later, after riding shotgun with an angelic ambulance driver who has taken the stricken Lazarescu on a heroic, Stygian journey through a long, rainy night of visiting multiple hospitals, trying to find one that will admit him for surgery despite severe overcrowding. There’s never been a film like Cristi Puiu’s Lazarescu, which so expertly draws us into a mundane medical crisis and keeps our hearts in our throats at every turn. When Lazarescu finally dies, quietly, on a gurney in a prep room, we only know it because the film ends at that moment, without any cues. The story is over.

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